05-A Gift From Earth

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Authors: Larry Niven
Tags: Fiction, General, Science-Fiction
he could do.
    "Don't be ashamed. The dead-man switch is an old trick. It almost never gets used in practice. The man in charge is too likely to change his mind at the last second. It's a — "
    "I fully expected to wake up dead!" the man shouted.
    " — natural reaction. It takes a psychotic to commit suicide. No, don't tell me all about it. I'm not interested. I want to hear about the car in your basement."
    "You think I'm a coward, do you?"
    "That's an ugly word."
    " I stole that car."
    "Did you?" The skeptical tone was genuine. Jesus Pietro did not believe him. "Then perhaps you can tell me why the theft went unnoticed."
    The man told him. He talked eagerly, demanding that Jesus Pietro recognize his courage. Why not? There was nobody left to betray. He would live as long as Jesus Pietro Castro was interested in him, and for three minutes longer. The organ bank operating room was three minutes walk away. Jesus Pietro listened politely. Yes, he remembered the car that had tauntingly circled the Plateau for five days. The young crew owner had given him hell for letting it happen. The man had even suggested--demanded — that one of Castro's men drop on the car from above, climb into the cockpit, and bring it back. Jesus Pietro's patience had given out, and he had risked his life by politely offering to help the young man perform the feat.
    "So we buried it at the same time we built the basement," the prisoner finished. "Then we let the house grow over it. We had great plans." He sagged into his former position of despair but went on talking, mumbling. "There were gun mounts. Bins for bombs. We stole a sonic stunner and mounted it in the rear window. Now nobody'll ever use them."
    "The car was used."
    "What?"
    "This afternoon. Keller escaped us last night. He returned to Kane's home this morning, took the car and flew it nearly to the Hospital before we stopped him. The Mist Demons know what he thought he was doing."
    "Great! 'The last flight of — ' We never got around to naming it. Our air force. Our glorious air force. Who did you say?"
    "Keller. Matthew Leigh Keller."
    "I don't know him. What would he be doing with my car?"
    "Don't play games. You are not protecting anyone. We drove him off the edge. Five ten, age twenty-one, hair brown, eyes blue — "
    "I tell you I never met him."
    "Good-by." Jesus Pietro pushed a button under his desk. The door opened.
    "Wait a minute. Now, wait — "
    Lying, Jesus Pietro thought, after the man was gone. Probably lied about the car too. Somewhere in the vivarium the man who really took the car waited to be questioned. If it was stolen. It could equally well have been supplied by a crew member, by Jesus Pietro's hypothetical traitor.
    He had often wondered why the crew would not supply him with truth drugs. They would have been easy to manufacture from instructions in the ship's libraries. Millard Parlette, in a mellow mood, had once tried to explain. "We own their bodies," he had said. "We take them apart on the slightest pretext; and if they manage to die a natural death, we get them anyway, what we can save. Aren't the poor bastards at least entitled to the privacy of their own minds?"
    It seemed a peculiar bleeding-heart attitude, coming from a man whose very life depended on the organ banks. But others apparently felt the same. If Jesus Pietro wanted his questions answered, he must depend on his own empirical brand of psychology.
    __________

    Polly Tournquist. Age: twenty. Height: five one. Weight: ninety-five. She wore a crumpled party dress in the colonist style. In Jesus Pietro's eyes it did nothing for her. She was small and brown, and compared to most of the women Jesus Pietro met socially, muscular. They were work muscles, not tennis muscles. Traces of callus marred her hands. Her hair, worn straight back, had a slight natural curl to it but no trace of style.
    Had she been raised as crew girls were raised, had she access to cosmetics available on Alpha Plateau, she would

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